Word: mandarin
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...allowed the newly homeless, or those too frightened to stay in their insecure buildings, to camp out in their lobbies. At the darkened Stanford Court, complimentary caviar and smoked salmon were served by candlelight. The motive was not mere generosity: the comestibles would have spoiled without refrigeration. At the Mandarin Oriental, a manager explained, "We're doing our best to give our guests first-class comfort, even while bedding them down in the lobby." The expense-account Seven Hills of San Francisco Restaurant served a free sidewalk lunch to anyone who passed by. ) Bankers in three-piece suits munched chicken...
...Boston, Historian Hugh Thomas (Lord Thomas of Swynnerton) said the world now is a "tessellated pavement without cement." He was quoting something Edmund Burke said about Charles Townshend, a brilliant but erratic 18th century British statesman. Not bad, but somewhat mandarin. The audience had to remember, or look up, tessellation, which is a mosaic of small pieces of marble, glass or tile. This age, thinks Lord Thomas, is a mosaic of fragments, with nothing to hold them together. Is it an age of brilliant incoherence? Yes. It is also an age of incoherent stupidity...
Even Jagger, when pressed, can come out with an observation, characteristically jaded and spoken like rock's foremost mandarin. "There's not a lot in rock that is new," he says. "It's the same kind of chord sequences and the same kind of rhythm references and the same recycling of subject matter. But I don't think it's a problem. I mean, traditional musical forms like folk music in three chords or blues are endearing to Americans. They find some comfort in them...
There's not much class, but plenty of struggle, at the Lipkin mansion in Beverly Hills. Oh, sure, the rich know brand names: Harry Winston's jewels drape each mandarin wrist, and much Steuben Glass stands about, waiting to be shattered; and at the funeral for the Lipkins' pet pooch, Michael Feinstein plays piano. But the Lipkins and the Hepburn-Saravians, their haughty next- door neighbors, are egalitarians when considering where their next bedmate should come from. By the end of a weekend in the country, two elegant matrons will have been seduced by their former husbands, one of whom...
...Take our mandarin oranges. I once stayed in a Soviet hotel with a Japanese figure skater. He wanted to know what kind of fruit was on sale that was small, sour and green and got scooped up into bags. I told him they were mandarin oranges. "They can't be," he said. "I know what a mandarin orange is." What could I say? Maybe they get specially harvested as buds just for our people, so we'll walk around with sour faces...